It appears that political correctness has infected many of our military brass, indeed even instructors in our military academies. It is one thing when politicians and cultural elites force it into our lives; it's quite dangerous, however, when those selected to protect us elevate political correctness over the necessity of vanquishing enemies intent on destroying us.

Many of us now believe that a much ballyhooed "higher morality" in the conduct of war is a major cause for America and the West not achieving its goal of destroying jihadist terrorisim. A new "counter-insurgency manual" provides evidence of a military guided not by the age-old assumption of an army's purpose being military victory over its enemy but, instead, attempts at sociology and "understanding" the enemy's culture, and the need to persuade the enemy of our goodness and noble intentions.

In the name of "compassion," our soldiers are at times asked to risk their lives, placing themselves in lethal fighting conditions, so as to spare the "innocents" among the enemy. Where bombing from above could easily destroy a terrorist hideout, young Americans are forced to fight treacherous hand-to-hand combat so that "innocents" mingled among the jihadists will not be harmed.

Because of this rule, more soldiers die than need be, creating, also, demoralization and hesitancy. Some, out of fear of later military reprimand, are reluctant to shoot at terrorist targets where civilians may also be. This, too, renders our war less effective than it could be. Beyond question, this new ethos stands in the way of victory. The Iraq war should have been won long ago. If soft political correctness remains a guiding military motif, the most powerful nation in the world will have defeated itself, given victory to a rag-tag al Qaeda band unworthy of being called fighting men.

Barely a dime's bit of difference between liberals pathetic cut and run policy and Republcans pathetic tendency to fight a politically correct war againt terrorists. They both add up to a longer war, and more U.S. casualties.

I proposed,long ago the B-52 saturation bombing of fallujah, Al Anbar province, and the sunni triangle, along with the shiite militia stongholds of Moktar Al Sadr.

You would see the white flags of unconditional surrender flying all over Iraq, after such an air campaign.

3
posted on 10/19/2006 7:17:41 PM PDT
by gitmogrunt
(Fallujah shoulda been leveled by B-52's.Conservative and Republican are not synonymous.)

The first paragraph was a good foreshadowing of the rest of this idiotic article:

It appears that political correctness has infected many of our military brass, indeed even instructors in our military academies. It is one thing when politicians and cultural elites force it into our lives; it's quite dangerous, however, when those selected to protect us elevate political correctness over the necessity of vanquishing enemies intent on destroying us.

The author has an uncanny ability to completely miss the point. This is a counterinsurgency manual, not an all-encompassing manual on warfighting doctrine. The military's job is to execute within the limitations placed upon it by the civilian leadership. In the case of counterinsurgency, the manual states doctrine that is developing based upon lessons learned from fighting against insurgencies within those likely limitations. If the author has a problem with that then his beef should be with the civilian leadership, not the military. Just because the military lays out doctrine for how to fight certain kinds of wars in a certain way, that does not mean that the military prefers all wars to be executed in that manner or believes in the prudence of the limitations placed upon it by the civilian leadership.

Thanks. It was emailed to me earlier and it didn't take long to reread this one-pager. You agree with this crap?

Those military brass who twist our soldiers from being fighting men to social workers should be fired.... If they don't have the stomach for real war and the criticism from the left, they should find another vocation. They have become a collateral damage to our security.

You actually think that the military is attempting to turn Soldiers into social workers? And you think that this Rabbi knows what "real war" is more so than our military leaders?

All I can tell you is from my personal combat experience in Nam 69 & 70. I walked point and on more than one occasion I had a VC teenager or woman come up on me and my patrol and if you think I waited around to ask them how their day was going, you have another thought coming.

We have Marines locked up in the brig at Camp Pendleton for months without being charged of a crime simply because the enemy says they "murdered" others.

Now when the Marine Corps starts taking the word of the enemy over the word of Marines; it is time to bring the Marine Corps home and send the Peace Corps.

Yes, I KNOW a PC war is trying to be waged because I KNOW those who are fighting it.

Respectfully, you're wrong. Any civil-military operations conducted are for the purpose of driving a wedge between insurgent factions, co-opting them, or building rapport with the people to gain intelligence and their cooperation. That's not social work.

I'll tell you what the real problem is..all the stinking leftist "social workers" from Europe, the UK and the US (basically the UN) are too chicken to go there so our guys have to wear those hats as well.

The "progressives" and their ilk are good at hiding behind faux news reports and pointing fingers but no one wants to help bake the pie.

The problem all along is that our arrogant left think the Iraqis are not worth the effort.

14
posted on 10/19/2006 8:11:45 PM PDT
by Earthdweller
(All reality is based on faith in something.)

October 18, 2006 -- HAVE we lost the will to win wars? Not just in Iraq, but anywhere? Do we really believe that being nice is more important than victory?

It's hard enough to bear the timidity of our civilian leaders - anxious to start wars but without the guts to finish them - but now military leaders have fallen prey to political correctness. Unwilling to accept that war is, by its nature, a savage act and that defeat is immoral, influential officers are arguing for a kinder, gentler approach to our enemies.

They're going to lead us into failure, sacrificing our soldiers and Marines for nothing: Political correctness kills.

Obsessed with low-level "tactical" morality - war's inevitable mistakes - the officers in question have lost sight of the strategic morality of winning. Our Army and Marine Corps are about to suffer the imposition of a new counterinsurgency doctrine designed for fairy-tale conflicts and utterly inappropriate for the religion-fueled, ethnicity-driven hyper-violence of our time.

We're back to struggling to win hearts and minds that can't be won.

The good news is that the Army and Marine Corps worked together on the new counterinsurgency doctrine laid out in Field Manual 3-24 (the Army version). The bad news is that the doctrine writers and their superiors came up with fatally wrong prescriptions for combating today's insurgencies.

Astonishingly, the doctrine ignores faith-inspired terrorism and skirts ethnic issues in favor of analyzing yesteryear's political insurgencies. It would be a terri- fic manual if we returned to Vietnam circa 1963, but its recommendations are profoundly misguided when it comes to fighting terrorists intoxicated with religious visions and the smell of blood.

Why did the officers in question avoid the decisive question of religion? Because the answers would have been ugly.

Wars of faith and tribe are immeasurably crueler and tougher to resolve than ideological revolts. A Maoist in Malaya could be converted. But Islamist terrorists who regard death as a promotion are not going to reject their faith any more than an ethnic warrior can - or would wish to - change his blood identity.

So the doctrine writers ignored today's reality.

Al Qaeda and other terror organizations have stated explicitly and repeatedly that they're waging a global jihad to re-establish the caliphate. Yet the new manual ignores religious belief as a motivation.

So the doctrine writers faked it, treating all insurgencies as political. As a result, they prescribed an excellent head-cold treatment - for a cancer patient. The text is a mush of pop-zen mantras such as "Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction," "The best weapons do not shoot," or "The more force used, the less effective it is."

That's just nutty. Should we have done nothing in the wake of 9/11? Would everything have been OK if we'd just been nicer? What non-lethal "best weapons" might have snagged Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, where the problem was too little military force, not too much violence?

Should we have sent fewer troops to Iraq, where inadequate numbers crippled everything we attempted? Will polite chats with tribal chiefs stop the sectarian violence drenching Iraq in blood?

On the surface, the doctrine appears sober and serious. But it's morally frivolous and intellectually inert, a pathetic rehashing of yesteryear's discredited "wisdom" on counterinsurgencies and, worst of all, driven by a stalker-quality infatuation with T.E. Lawrence, "Lawrence of Arabia," who not only was a huckster of the first order, but whose "revolt in the desert" was a near-meaningless sideshow of a sideshow.

Lawrence is quoted repeatedly, with reverence. We might as well cite the British generals of the Great War who sent men over the top in waves to face German machine guns.

You can trust two kinds of officers: Those who read a great deal and those who don't read at all. But beware the officer who reads just a little and falls in love with one book. A little education really is a dangerous thing.

The new manual is thick - length is supposed to substitute for insight. It should be 75 percent shorter and 100 percent more honest. If issued to our troops in its present form, it will lead to expensive failures. Various generals have already tried its prescriptions in Iraq - with discouraging results, to put it mildly.

We've reached a fateful point when senior officers seek to evade war's brute reality. Our leaders, in and out of uniform, must regain their moral courage. We can't fight wars of any kind if the entire chain of command runs for cover every time an ambitious journalist cries, "War crime!" And sorry: Soccer balls are no substitute for bullets when you face fanatics willing to kill every child on the playing field.

In war, you don't get points for good manners. It's about winning. Victory forgives.

The new counterinsurgency doctrine recommends forbearance, patience, understanding, non-violent solutions and even outright passivity. Unfortunately, our enemies won't sign up for a replay of the Summer of Love in San Francisco. We can't treat hardcore terrorists like Halloween pranksters on mid-term break from prep school.

Where is the spirit of FDR and George C. Marshall, who recognized that the one unbearable possibility was for the free world to lose?

We discount the value of ferocity - as a practical tool and as a deterrent. But war's immutable law - proven yet again in Iraq - is that those unwilling to pay the butcher's bill up front will pay it with compound interest in the end.

The new counterinsurgency doctrine is dishonest and cowardly.

We don't face half-hearted Marxists tired of living in the jungle, but religious zealots who behead prisoners to please their god and who torture captives by probing their skulls with electric drills. We're confronted by hatreds born of blood and belief and madmen whose appetite for blood is insatiable.

"We don't face half-hearted Marxists tired of living in the jungle, but religious zealots who behead prisoners to please their god and who torture captives by probing their skulls with electric drills. We're confronted by hatreds born of blood and belief and madmen whose appetite for blood is insatiable."

Bingo!

22
posted on 10/19/2006 10:07:24 PM PDT
by stephenjohnbanker
(Our troops will send all of the worlds terrorists to hell in a handbasket with no virgins!)

Seems the nature of war has changed. Seems like it started with Korea and the Iran hostage crisis seems like it was a major turning point.

It sure seems like a conventional war can no longer be won. It can only be used to gain turf.

Maybe it would be better to mothball all the carriers and tanks and just contract out with big bucks to insane "show no quarter" mercenary assasins who no one controls and no one knows where they came from or where to retaliate in the aftermath......(kind of like how Iran does it.)

25
posted on 10/19/2006 10:28:28 PM PDT
by KTM rider
( "It's time for conservites to take back the republican party" Goldwater64)

"understanding" the enemy's culture, and the need to persuade the enemy of our goodness and noble intentions.

It's not the enemy's culture we need to understand, but rather that of our major allies in the war on the terrorists. All we need to know about the terrorists is how to kill them. That's also what our allies need to know about them. Why to kill them, we both already know, all too well.

Actually you get more bang for the buck with guided weapons. A smaller lighter bomb, that hits or comes very close to it's target is a lot more effective than many larger bombs, only a few of which get close enough to targets of interest. And you can carry more of the smaller weapons per sortie.

Imagine an Arc-Light type strike, only with more bombs, each with it's individual target (although more than one might be devoted to larger/harder targets).

Thank you for the great post and follow-up comments. As a father of a Marine and someone who has been saying this same thing for about a year now I am getting more worried every day. We have given our enemy a pass on where they can operate out of as we did in Vietnam and our enemies now know that we are fighting with our hands tied. Over the past few weeks we have seen the casualty counts mount as we get closer to the election as they try and make us quit the fight. President Bush and the rest of the people I voted for have let us all down, they failed to fight to win. Maybe they were afraid the American public wouldn't support the carnage the reality of a real war would look like on the news every night, if so they should not have sacrificed our troops.

I agree completely (see tagline) that the B-52's should have been unleashed on the cities. Now Al-Sadr has taken over a city in southern Iraq. If it is not cordoned off and levelled, then we need to cut our losses and bring the troops home.

One thing for sure. Like in every war fought, one can expect a full spectrum of emotions and logic sequences to be set forth. It is healthy to debate. In some ways we will not know if we won this SASO (lets remember, the war in Iraq was over in a short time), and a long Stablization and Security Operation was anticipated by some, for perhaps a few years if the final outcome is a continued democratically elected central unity government based on their constitution. No one knows how long such operations are required regardless of who one is fighting. And in Iraq we have such additional complicated political processes, diverse tribal and sectarian divides to contend with. To equate this SASO and the closely associated GWOT with the second world war is un-realistic. Only from the emotional point of view could one equate them on the same plane. If I may. If all of a sudden the US federal government in full support of all 52 states decided it was time to really get tough on the war on drugs. Would it be ok to nuke say NYC to rid it of all it's criminal elements. That is what a lot of folks continue to suggest we do in Iraq. The GWOT is going to be a long war indeed. It will take place as we see in many lands under different conditions. It will need the continued support of all nations that feel Islamic terrorist organizations must be eradicated. I for one do not see any end in sight. That's my two cents.

33
posted on 10/20/2006 4:54:52 PM PDT
by Marine_Uncle
(Honor must be earned)

Sorry, but boasting isnt an argument. Your and my combat experience is irrelevant to this thread and, in an anonymous forum, recounting is pointless. Pointing out that you were in Vietnam, rather than making a coherent argument, does nothing to reinforce any argument. It suggests that you have no argument and that you can only attempt to spew forth appeals from what you think gives you a position of authority: I was in Vietnam, therefore  That is the line of reasoning that Ann Coulter argued against in regard to the 9/11 widows and Cindy Sheehan.

Instead, why not explain why Im wrong? Or did you post this thread just to fish for an excuse to point out that you are a Marine and a Vietnam Veteran? Right is right and wrong is wrong, whether youre Audie Murphy or Jane Fonda. Nobodys experience has anything to do with whether the author has a grasp of two simple points:1) this manual is but one manual among many in the Army and Marine Corps doctrinal library and it does not speak to conventional warfighting2) neither this manual nor any other Army or USMC manual advocates the need to persuade the enemy of our goodness and noble intentions. That is something completely different from drawing fence-sitters to our side and acknowledging that our enemies must be coerced or killed.

In regard to your cited experience from Vietnam, that is somewhat analogous to patrols in Iraq. If a patrol thinks that a suicide bomber is approaching them, then they avoid it or shoot it, though it is usually in the form of a vehicle. There is nothing wrong with that, it continues, and this manual wont change that.

Back to the point, I see no evidence that the author of the article so much as skimmed the manual that he criticizes. If you want to peruse it, the June 2006 draft is available online here.

Note the two guys who signed off on it: LTG David Petraeus (USA) and LTG James Mattis (USMC). But I suppose that LTG James "It's fun to shoot some people" Mattis is too touchy-feely for you. If you want to play the game of comparing experiences in order to determine who is right or wrong then send an email to those guys. I'm sure that they will be heavily swayed by your argument of: I disagree, I was in Vietnam, therefore you're wrong.

Imagine an Arc-Light type strike, only with more bombs, each with it's individual target (although more than one might be devoted to larger/harder targets).

Imagine a response to a terrorist attack where we swiftly and quietly go to the country which did the most to sponsor the terrorists. And where the private homes of each of the 100 most influencial citizens gets hit by a GBU-39.

And then the world gets told that from now on, the homes of anybody financially contributing to Jihad groups is on the target list

38
posted on 10/21/2006 10:38:20 AM PDT
by SauronOfMordor
(A planned society is most appealing to those with the arrogance to think they will be the planners)

Disclaimer:
Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual
posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its
management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the
exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.